Sophia Marmaridou

Reviewing linguistic thought : converging trends for the 21st century

The papers in this volume focus on the interaction of different levels of linguistic analysis (syntax, semantics, pragmatics) and the interfaces between them, on the convergence of different theoretical models in explaining linguistic phenomena, and on recent interdisciplinary approaches to linguistic analysis. The selected works, including papers by renowned scholars, highlight the necessity for the study of language to be paired with the study of cognition and for linguistics to develop more substantive links to other disciplines, bringing forward the converging trends which originate within different theoretical frameworks. The volume is of particular relevance to scholars and students who are interested in an in-depth overview of 20th century linguistics outside or beyond the generative paradigm, and in exploring the development of 20th centuryinfluence on current work.

On the conceptual, cultural and discursive motivation of Greek pain lexicalizations

Abstract This paper provides evidence for the interaction of conceptual structure, cultural models and discursive practices in motivating pain lexicalizations and related constructions in Greek. It is argued that pain is construed as a process or state, a designated property, or an instance of a process or state, prototypically associated with an experiencer and a cause. The elaboration of this core semantics of pain by image-schematic and metaphorical structure and a cultural narrative of selfhood yields metaphorical extensions of pain as an entity and motivates its understanding in the physical and the psychological modalities. Finally, frequency counts of pain lexicalizations in different discourse genres provide evidence for the discursive motivation of the lexical categories at hand. These findings seem to argue for points of contact between cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Sweetser 1990; Langacker 2000), a discursive view of relativity (Clark 1996; Lucy 1996), and a neo-Whorfian perspective on language as a bio-cultural hybrid (Levinson 2003).

What's in a dialogic construction? A constructional approach to polysemy and the grammar of challenge

Abstract In this paper we address lexical polysemy in a constructional perspective, arguing that each of the conversational meanings we identify for Modern Greek ela (2nd person singular imperative of the verb erxome ‘come’) is appropriately modeled as a conceptual gestalt of formal (including prosodic) and semantic-pragmatic properties. In turn-initial position, ela is used to challenge a preceding utterance; we show that the variations in the kind of challenge expressed are systematically tied to the word that follows ela, the speech act force and the sentence type of the preceding utterance, and finally prosodic and textual cues. To the extent that these varieties of conversational challenge are conditioned by particular contextual features, we treat them as a family of related constructions whose common features can be captured in the form of a generalized ela construction abstracted from the different sub-patterns. Our analysis thus demonstrates the appropriateness of a constructional framework for dealing with the different kinds of parameters involved in dialogic meaning and strongly suggests that at least some of the variation inherent in discourse is amenable to a grammatical description, so that sentence-level and supra-clause patterns can be analyzed in a uniform way.

Towards a Constructional Account of Indefinite Uses of Proper Names in Modern Greek

This paper addresses the issue of Modern Greek proper names, within the framework of Construction Grammar. More specifically, proper noun headed nominal constructions will be the focus of attention. Unlike earlier accounts that view common and proper nouns as grammatically, semantically and functionally distinct from each other, the present investigation provides evidence for constructional properties these categories have in common. It will be shown that in Modern Greek a proper noun as head of a nominal construction unifies with determiners and adjectives in the same way that common nouns do. Moreover, like common nouns, proper noun heads activate semantic frames associated with particular categories of entities (e.g. persons, cities, cars, etc.). Additionally, proper noun frames are contextually rich. More specifically, the use of a proper noun activates a frame which is so rich in information specificity that in this frame the name identifies a unique referent. This referent can provide metonymic access to various aspects of the frame when the proper noun is the head of a nominal construction. Significantly, metonymic uses of proper nouns in indefinite constructions, varying in degree of conventionality, are often associated with a subjective viewpoint and rate high in expressivity. Apparently, the findings of this study argue for a holistic, constructional approach to proper names and a frame-based analysis of their use. The present corpus-based analysis adopts a Construction Grammar 1 I am greatly indebted to the Dept. of English Language and Literature of the Univ. of Thessaloniki and the organizing committee of ISTAL20 for inviting me to give a plenary talk at the conference. This paper has benefited from several participants’ comments, questions, and suggestions and especially from a long discussion with Joseph Emonds. All shortcomings are, of course, my own. Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/22/19 9:02 PM Major Trends in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 6 8 Invited Papers framework and notation after Fried & Östman (2004) to highlight inheritance relations and unification principles among the relevant constructions. Moreover, the investigation makes reference to mental space theory and conceptual blends as in Fauconnier (1997) and the concept of frame-metonymy as in Sweetser and Fauconnier (1996). Therefore, the present work argues for a usage-based perspective on language and a principled exploration of its cognitive, cultural, and constructional motivations.